TechEdge AI Interview with Fredrik Borg, Chief Executive Officer, Varnish Software

Hello Fredrik, could you tell us about your professional journey which led to you being the CEO of Varnish Software?

Throughout my career spanning over 15 years in the telecom industry, I've been deeply committed to driving growth and spearheading innovation. My journey has been marked by significant achievements, particularly in leading operations that have catalyzed transformative changes within the sector.

One of the highlights of my career was my tenure at Global Connect, a major Nordic telecom infrastructure provider. There, I had the privilege of leading a talented team of more than 550 professionals. Over four years, we embarked on an ambitious scale-up effort that not only tripled the company's revenues but also quadrupled its earnings. Our efforts culminated in the realization of one of the top five largest total infrastructure projects in the Nordics, a testament to our team's dedication and innovative approach to overcoming challenges.

My role at Telenor, a multinational telecom firm, further allowed me to refine my leadership and operational skills. Leading the company's multi-million-dollar operations across mobile networks, broadband, and TV, I was instrumental in driving efficiency and enhancing service delivery to meet the evolving needs of our customers. This experience reinforced my belief in the power of teamwork, strategic planning, and the relentless pursuit of excellence in the telecom industry.

What is the primary function of Varnish Software's caching technology and how does it contribute to delivering fast web and streaming experiences for large audiences?

As the CEO of Varnish Software, my focus is on enhancing digital content accessibility and speed for our users. Our advanced caching technology, central to Varnish Enterprise, optimizes the delivery process from the origin to the edge. Varnish Enterprise enables seamless delivery, accelerating HTTP interactions, handling traffic loads efficiently, and protecting web infrastructure.  By doing so, it ensures rapid access and seamless streaming for users, which is vital for businesses seeking to deliver outstanding online services and experiences.

What role does Varnish Software play in enabling global businesses to build custom CDNs?

At Varnish Software, we play a key role in helping global businesses craft their own custom CDNs. Our product, Varnish Enterprise, stands as a flexible and powerful platform, perfectly suited for building bespoke content delivery services. What makes it special is its platform-agnostic nature and its ability to be fully configured, ensuring optimal HTTP delivery for a wide range of applications. This versatility and the capacity for customization make Varnish Enterprise the go-to choice for companies eager to develop CDNs tailored to their unique needs.

How does the technology “Artifact Caching” helps boost developer productivity and streamline DevOps processes?

Organizations using artifact management tools at scale within DevOps workflows often face significant challenges, notably in terms of latency and costs. Development teams frequently encounter issues when retrieving large volumes of data from resources like Artifactory, leading to substantial delays. This is especially true when organizations deploy artifact management tools on premise while global teams require access. High demand, round-trip distance and traffic loads harm developer productivity and overall business efficiency. Addressing these issues often involves increasing infrastructure and licensing, which introduces additional risks and drawbacks. Using artifact management on cloud platforms can also entail large egress bandwidth fees in line with the large object size of the artifacts being pulled.

As a software-based caching layer, Varnish sits in front of Artifactory instances and caches popular artifacts, delivering them to users instead of relying on Artifactory to do so. This achieves multiple benefits: Faster delivery of the requested objects because it’s handled by Varnish caching software that is optimized for performance. Heavily reduced requests hitting the backend, enabling many more clients to simultaneously request content. They aren’t bottlenecked by Artifactory’s own capacity limits. Varnish is capable of handling many thousands of requests per second, so Artifactory can run at a heavily reduced thread count.

Varnish also stops upstream performance issues affecting response times, reduces load while revalidating, and ensures secure low-latency access for remote workers. With tight integration into DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, and fast time-to-implementation across cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments, Varnish Enterprise is an efficient pathway towards Artifactory ROI and improved productivity.

What benefits do clients like Nikon, Sky, Emirates, and Tesla experience by using Varnish Software's solutions?

Clients like Nikon, Sky, Emirates, and Tesla, who use Varnish Software's solutions, experience a range of significant benefits that enhance their digital operations and user experience:

• Reduced Capital and Operating Expenses: One of the key advantages of using Varnish Software's solutions is the substantial reduction in capital and operating expenses. This cost efficiency is crucial for companies looking to optimize their budget while maintaining high-quality digital services. By offloading traffic to Varnish, clients find they need much fewer servers to run their operations, while cloud and CDN costs can see a reduction, via less egress.
• Dramatically Reduced Latency: Varnish Software's solutions have been successful in reducing latency by up to 80%. This is particularly beneficial for businesses that rely on fast and efficient digital content delivery, as it ensures a smoother and more responsive user experience.
• Increased Object Delivery Speed: Another significant benefit is the increase in object delivery speed, which can be 10-100 times faster with Varnish Software’s caching solutions. This speed is vital for businesses that deal with large amounts of data and require rapid content delivery to their users.
• Enhanced Cache Hit Ratios: Varnish Software’s solutions also help in increasing cache hit ratios by as much as 50-90%. This improvement in cache efficiency means that more content can be served directly from the cache, reducing the load on origin servers and improving overall system performance.

By leveraging Varnish Software's caching and content delivery solutions, these companies have been able to enhance their web performance, accelerate content delivery, and optimize their digital infrastructure, leading to improved user experiences and operational efficiencies.

Your company has a very unique approach to team building activity- Beer Brewing. Can you talk more about it?

The beer brewing is a creative reflection of our organizational culture. This activity is more than just a fun endeavor; it's a symbolic representation of our core values: creativity, teamwork, and the pursuit of excellence. This process requires precision, attention to detail, and a bit of creative flair, much like the way we approach our business solutions.